By Daniel Rickenbacher
With the arrival of a new class of Islamist activists like Ilhan Omar or Linda Sarsour, the “progressive”, radical Left wing of the Democratic Party has gained prominence and repeated antisemitic statements have become routine. In order to understand this behaviour, one has to look back at the history of the radical Left, which increasingly dominates the Democratic Party.
The belief system of the radical Left is based on the expectation that a revolutionary class will eventually stage a revolution, overturning the current social, political and economic order to herald a new age. In classical Marxism, this revolutionary class is the proletariat or the workers. However, as the European and US working classes embraced reformist politics and consumer capitalism, and rejected socialism in the booming economy of the 1950s, the radical Left found itself in the embarrassing situation of losing its revolutionary class. As a result, its politics fundamentally changed – something which is little appreciated by many of the Left’s detractors in North America, who still accuse it of being “Marxist”. In fact,
The past sixty years of Radical Left history were characterized by the often-desperate attempt to identify a replacement proletariat, one which could fulfill the revolutionary promise on which the working class failed to deliver. In the 1960s, radicals identified Third World nations, such as the Vietnamese, or groups like the Palestinians, as the new revolutionary class. Under the banner of “anti-Imperialism”, it supported every “nationalist liberation” group purporting to be part of the socialist camp and vowing to mercilessly fight the US, whether they were Syrian fascists (such as the leaders of the PFLP), Red Khmer murderers or Gaddafi’s henchmen.
While Western bourgeois concepts such as human rights mattered little to them, antisemitism became a central tenet. For the sake of global salvation, tiny Israel, allegedly the center of worldwide imperialism and capitalism, had to be destroyed.
The Left’s shared anti-Westernism and antisemitism made Islamism, a far-right movement originating in Egypt in the 1920s, and nationalist Left “anti-Imperialism”, ideal partners. Leftists increasingly appreciated what they believed to be the revolutionary potential of Islam, with some, such as the arch terrorist Carlos (the “Jackal”), even converting to Islam and praising Al-Qaeda.
After 9/11, Islamo-Leftism – open or tacit alliances between Left-wing and Islamist groups–became a widespread but often overlooked phenomenon in Europe and the Middle East. Even though postmodern Left-wing academic activists such as philosopher Judith Butler openly called for an alliance with Islamism much earlier, Islamo-Leftism saw its breakthrough only in the Obama years, when the Democratic Party took a sharp turn to the left.
The Obama administration normalized domestic Islamists from above, cooperating with them in their supposedly “counter-radicalization” programs, while the left-wing base within the Democratic Party increasingly rejected universalist and liberal values. They adopted instead an anti-imperialist and racialist worldview, which construed Western and US civilization myopically as an expression of “White oppression” and “privilege”. They started to build an “intersectional” alliance of “marginal” against Western societies, of which—surprise!—Israel was allegedly the most evil representative.
Jewish organizations and activists, in particular liberal ones, must realize that antisemitism, whether in its cruder forms or veiled in anti-Israelism, is fundamental to the “intersectional” movement. And the same was true for the New Left anti-Imperialism of the 1970s. They should not seek the approval of “intersectionalists” (like the ADL is doing), who will continue to victimize Jews, but rather they must deconstruct and fight their toxic ideology.
